Environmental Guidelines - Directorial interest at last

Arriving at the Museums Australia annual conference in Canberra a couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to be greeted by the news that CAMD (the Council of Australian Museum Directors) had the day before agreed to put sustainability as a priority action item for their next period of operation.  As Andrew Sayers, the soon to depart Director of the National Museum of Australia, summed it up in an article in the Canberra Times;

The costs of maintaining collections are rising dramatically and museums worldwide are sharing ideas about how to make operations more cost effective. When I began working in art museums 30 years ago, it was a matter of pride for museum managers to maintain temperature and humidity settings within very narrow bands of variation all day, all year. Nowadays we recognise such conditions come at considerable environmental cost. The profession is looking, with some urgency, at ways of achieving acceptable conditions without the giant carbon footprints.

Read more here.

We, who have been talking this talk for the last few years, have always known that the key to moving forward was to get the museum and gallery directors on board with the issue. Some have been there for a while, witness Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate, at the IIC Climate Dialogue in London in 2008 saying he had no problem asking visitors to wear overcoats in winter rather than turn the heating up. Or these acerbic comments (and backhand slap to conservators) from Maxwell Anderson, formerly director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and now director of the Dallas Museum of Art, when he said this:

Throughout their history, art museums have spawned and fostered a subculture indifferent to developments in the world at large. Our ocean liner-like art galleries are slow to change course even in the face of evidence demanding it. A critical illustration of this habit is the rigid formula arrived at long ago that prescribes the set points of relative humidity and temperature in our museums.

It remains an unshakable conviction for most conservators and administrators that unless a museum can guarantee lenders that its interior climate is 20 degrees celsius and 50 per cent relative humidity (with an allowance for minor fluctuations), it has no business asking for loans, and cannot be trusted with its own collection. That conviction informs many facets of a museum’s operations beyond the cost, including how art is borrowed, lent, shipped, installed and stored.

I was then quoted in The Australian the week following the Conference on the issue, which you can read about here.

There is at last traction in this space, but as I wrote about in my previous blog on this issue, there are going to be no easy answers.

Photography in Museums

I was sent this image by a colleague in the UK, questioning whether this is a standard Aussie museum greeting. It's so bad that I thought initially it must be a set up. I hope it is, but next time I am in Parramatta I shall check it out.

It does however raise the ongoing issue of whether or not to allow photography in museums. This is being discussed at present on various professional forums and is the subject of a specialist article in the latest edition of the UK  Museums Journal ( December 2012) The standard response in the past has been a no-no particularly in art galleries, for two basic reasons:

1) that the high lux level of the camera flash significantly increases the rate of fading of artworks and

b) that the process of photographing an object is a disturbance to other visitors.

The reality in 2013 is that almost every visitor carries a camera with them in the form of a mobile phone. Moreover many visitors live in a world where the sharing and commenting on photos is almost as ubiquitous as the exchange of messages.  Museums are also increasingly using the technology of mobiles to allow access to further information, whether through QR codes, NFC ( near field communication) , or visual recognition ( see the Getty's experience of this).  All require the phone camera to be offered up to the object or associated label, so how is a poor gallery attendant going to work out whether an actual photo is being taken.

Added to this , the UK National Gallery has studied the fading effects of flash, and has concluded it is absolutely minimal, needing millions of flash events before any damage can be detected.

On top of this a recent UK Museums Association survey that showed 83% of museum staff believe visitors should be allowed to take photos, as it actively helps engagement, and by the sharing of images through Instagram and Pinterest can be used as part of a marketing strategy.

So it seems the only sensible thing to do is to work out how to maximise the benefit to the museum, and actively encourage it.

Two words of caution however. One is to watch out for copyright issues, particularly when allowing photography of loan items - many museums are advising that such objects cannot be photographed for this reason. The other is to ask visitors to turn their flash function off, so as to limit the disturbance to other visitors.

Environmental Guidelines - the Munich conference wash up

It has taken me longer than I expected to digest the Munich ' Climate for Collections' conference, not just because the content was so full on, but also because the conclusions are difficult to summarise.  What I can relay is that the proposed voting with red and green cards at the conclusion of the conference to flush out the general view of the delegates to relaxing or not relaxing environmental parameters sensibly did not go ahead. The reason for this was simply that  the issue is clearly not as simple as this.

So where do I read the current situation sits?  Somewhere along the following lines:

-  existing  environmental parameters for collections are based on a blanket approach, and are unnecessarily tight for all but the most vulnerable of artworks, e.g. panel paintings, and ignore the issue of 'proofed' RH, that is the extremes to which the artwork has already been exposed in its lifetime

-  major museums and galleries worldwide are recognising this and implementing relaxed parameters, e.g. The Tate, the Smithsonian and the V&A.

-  however a significant proportion of the conservation profession are not convinced that the risks in relaxing these parameters can be safely managed, a position best articulated by the National Gallery

- we are not going to achieve consensus amongst conservators internationally on this and therefore there will be no new blanket environmental standards ( coming to this realisation was my big take away from Munich)

But what we cannot do is to throw up our hands and say this is all too hard, not least because, in my view, folks, this is about the planet ( witness the news from the Climate Conference in Doha this week).  There are a number of ways forward :

Firstly,  in my experience air conditioning engineers and building managers are often not achieving the maximum efficiencies from HVAC systems, that is they know how they are built and operated, but are not focused on achieving optimum efficiency . To do so requires dialogue with the museum' s conservators, which is invariably not taking place.

Secondly, this dialogue can effectively achieve substantial energy savings without major capital investment and without sacrificing preservation quality, whilst safely managing any associated risks to collections. I have seen it in action.

Thirdly, this requires a holistic understanding of the collections, HVAC systems and capabilities, buildings, outdoor climate and infrastructure/capabilities of the staff .  What is clear is that every situation is unique.

 

This is way too important an issue to pull up the 'too hard' white flag on. You will hear more from me on this shortly.

Environmental Guidelines for Museums - the latest

Climate for Collections is the title of the conference I am currently attending at the Doerner Institute in Munich.  Part of the 4 million Euro Climate for Culture , the conference is seeking to establish consensus amongst conservators about the levels to which environmental standards in museums and galleries can be relaxed.  I have previously blogged about this vexed question. 

And boy is it vexed!  I had imagined ( I now realise somewhat naively) that I was coming to a meeting where we would be in general agreement on the sustainability and economic need to relax these standards within carefully defined guidelines.  

What I have walked into is a major reaction to the Bizot Group ( of museum directors) push to make these relaxed standards become a reality.  The German conservators in particular are fiercely resistant to any relaxation and see the Bizot push as being all about making loans more easily available between themselves.  So the National Gallery's view on this ( see previous blog) is more widely supported than I had realised.

All will come to a head on Friday when we vote individually where we stand with coloured cards ( red against the Bizot push, yellow for undecided and green for support).

My personal view is this is missing the point.  Let's ignore what the Bizot motives might be.  As conservators we are in a prime position to lead in this discussion which more and more is being driven by skyrocketing energy prices more than the morality of sustainability.  We understand  the ability of materials to cope or not to indoor climate fluctuations, the various damage functions, and the opportunities that exist to play with HVAC systems.

More very soon after Friday's vote!  

Abu Dhabi museum story

No visit to Abu Dhabi, where I have just been working for three days, can avoid the extraordinary museum building program taking place on Saadiyat Island just a bridge away from the CBD. It's a surreal confluence of 'name' architects competing with each other to produce the masterpiece of the area. Norman Foster is at work on the new Zayed National Museum, 

 Frank Gehry on the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim, 

Jean Nouvel on the Louvre Abu Dhabi, 

and Zara Hadid on the Maritime Museum and Performing Arts Centre.

What the estimated $27 billion project will look like is currently explained in an impressive 15,500 sq m visitor centre known as the Manarat Al Saadiyat, which certainly helps as, despite an original opening date of 2014, at present there is little evidence of anything happening.

At one level it is going to be a great place to visit to see some extraordinary buildings, the Nouvel dome for the Louvre Abu Dhabi  being to my mind the future star of the show with its geometric lace patterns in the roof resulting in a rain of light. 

What is much less clear is what is going to go inside each of them, though presumably the Guggenheim and the Louvre will both draw extensively on their respective parental bodies. It is also unclear who will go to them apart from tourists as there is no local tradition of museum going. Cleverly a number of temporary exhibitions mounted with the British Museum are being run in the Manarat Al Saadiyat to get them into the swing of it.

And amazingly just across the Persian Gulf in Doha the Qataris are building their own version, with the Qatar National Museum designed by, you guessed it, Jean Nouvel.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

Vienna and Conferences

Spending eight days conferencing in Vienna, as I did earlier this month, sounds like a tough gig, but heh someone's got to attend these conferences or they won't happen. In this instance it was the bi annual Congress of IIC, the International Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic works. I'm a bit of a groupie for these get togethers of conservators from around the world, this being my fourth one. I am also Vice President of IIC.
So what did I bring back from a week in this World Heritage city? As always at IIC conferences, a realisation of the wealth of conservation work which is going on in highly specialised areas all over the world. Conservation papers ranged from treatment of tin relief on thirteenth century Cypriot wall paintings to decorative paint on seventeenth century Flemish harpsichords, wall paintings in Tutankhamen's tomb, crystal torcheres in Hawaii and Le Corbusier kitchens.

Stand out moments for me were Kasi Albert from Artlab Australia tackling the difficult issue of what to do about rivets used in old ceramic repairs, Heather Tetley on the challenges of in situ historic carpet repairs in an aptly tilted paper "Underfoot and Overlooked", and Sarah Staniforth from the National Trust on 'Use it or Lose it", discussing the need to make the National Trust collections accessible, and accept that some damage may occur in the process.

Along the way I could not resist slipping out to explore the extraordinary diversity of Vienna's cultural collections from the fabulous KunstHistoriche Museum to the Albertina. Stand outs for me were:

- the collections of the Natural History Museum, which pays limited lipservice to modern interpretative methodologies and lives by the depth of its collections presented with minimal interpretation in beautiful mahogany showcases in stunningly decorated rooms

- the new Klimt exhibition at the Belvedere which employs a series of apt dual language quotes in English and German written high on the wall of each gallery thus avoiding a cram of people trying to catch up with storyboards

The next IIC Congress will be in Hong Kong in September 2014. As in the same month ICOM's Committee for Conservation will be meeting in Melbourne, it promises to be a big year for conservation conferences.

Ecce Homo and Copyright

Rarely does the role of the amateur restorer achieve such notoriety as that of octogenarian Cecilia Gimenez.  In fact I cannot remember a so called ' conservation story ' ( well it involves conservators or likely will do somewhere along the line) making headlines to this extent in the mainstream press.

 

The basic facts are that Cecilia decided to retouch the 'Ecce Homo" ( Behold the Man) fresco in the Spanish church of Santurario de Misericordia near Zaragoza, by the late nineteenth century Spanish artist Elias Garcia Martinez, as she was concerned by its deterioration.

Unfortunately her efforts left Jesus looking like a very hairy monkey in an ill fitting tunic, hence its new name, 'Ecce Mono' (Behold the Monkey).

 

 

The result of all this coverage is that 1,000 people a day are turning up at said church to view the simian look alike, the crowds being such that the entrepreneurial church elders have decided to charge 1 Euro per visitor.

 

And this is where it gets interesting!  Where does the money go?  Cecilia is claiming copyright as people are coming to see her work, and wants the money to go to charity to support muscular dystrophy from which her son suffers.  The sixteen grandchildren of the artist have different ideas, on the basis they own the copyright.

 

I'm not sure what the Spanish law will decide, but in Australia I have recently discovered that conservators can in certain instances actually claim copyright over the works they have treated. Although this has yet to be tested in court , it is clear from existing copyright judgements that where the conservator is bringing to the  treatment of the artwork their own artistic ability in terms of independent skill and judgement, then copyright belongs to them.

 

And it is a principle of copyright law that once the copyright is deemed to be vested in the part of the artwork that has been treated, then the whole work and not just the treated parts become subject to copyright.   Clearly for most of our work as conservators this is not relevant. But when we undertake a major inpainting project or the complete repatination of a sculpture, then it would appear that copyright belongs to the conservator.

 

Given that Ecce Homo falls into this bracket, it would appear therefore that copyright does belong to Cecilia ( along with the a share of the income from visitors, mousepads, t-shirts, puzzles, travel mugs, mobile phone cases etc etc).

 

 

 

QR codes and visual recognition

It is an indicator of the speed of technological development that six months on from my previous blog on QR codes there is substantial movement in both the specific QR space and the broader alternatives such as image recognition.

A number of great links around. First up, Nancy Proctor is fast cementing her position as the leading commentator on this space from her role as Head of Mobile Strategy and Initiatives at the Smithsonian. She is a key player at Museums and the Web (which she co-organises), and the US MuseumComputer Network and was the key note speaker this year at MuseumNext conference which draws all the European museum bods in this area. That key note is well worth downloading here, focusing on the need for museum technologists to continue to focus on the outputs of new technologies rather than the technologies themselves.  Some technologies will succeed and some will fail, and the biggest issue for museums will be how to choose where to invest hard won funds. Check out also an enlightening interview with Nancy at Nancy Proctor on Mobile in Museums (and Revolutionary Change).

On which note it is clear that QR codes are here to stay more firmly than they were a year ago. Follow the chat on the Linked In Museums In TheDigital Age Group Members to see how many museums world wide are using them. My view is that despite the ugliness of QR codes they are increasing recognised as an entry point for object information and are easy to read, whereas image recognition technologies, despite being less in your face (with the consequential  disadvantage of course that you do not know they are present) are still struggling with recognising anything apart from complex two dimensional artworks, i.e. they do not easily recognise simple images, photographs and many three dimensional objects.

Where this current round of technologies continues to track towards is a confluence of the benefits of the various solutions which ultimately will provide:

• access to information via visitor's own device ( or via a device that can be lent by the museum)

• a level of information that transcends the current offering of wall labels, video screens and audio tours. It will be able to be personalised, and allow the visitor to learn what they like at the level of information they choose

• active engagement via social media allowing the visitor to engage with other visitors and share comments

• dynamic wayfinding that provides an active guided navigation experience around the museum and also draws attention to objects the visitor may be interested in on the route followed

• location awareness allowing the visitors own device to work out what the visitor is looking at without prompting or actively locating

Probably the nearest example of this can be seen in the forthcoming Gallery 1 project at the Cleveland Museum of Art - details of the paper to be given on it at the November annual MCN Conference are at the MCN site.  But I am sure I shall be blogging in less than six months with a further technology update.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Good times in WA and less good times in the UK

The announcement in May of the redevelopment of the WA Museum is good news, but has been a long term in coming. It had a false start along the way in 2008, when under Dawn Casey's directorship the Museum's relocation to the old Swan River powerstation was announced. Although the monies were about the same for the latter project, about half was going to be eaten up by site remediation. And it seems to be generally agreed in Perth that the powerstation was not a good site being off the tourist track and difficult to access.

So the new plan sounds a whole lot better way to spend the not inconsiderable sum of $428.3 million.  

What the good citizens of WA will get for their money is 23,000 m2 of museum, including various refurbished heritage buildings with 8,500 m2 of public spaces, themed around Being Western Australian, Discovering Western Australia and Exploring Our World, and 1,000m2 of temporary exhibition space.

As Australian museum projects go it dwarfs anything we have seen of late, which admittedly has tended to be new wings ($50m at MCA in 2012,  $45m at the Australian Museum in in 2008), is almost 4 times the cost of GOMA (2006) in Brisbane, is twice the cost of the National Museum (2001) and significantly more than the Melbourne Museum (1998). The challenge will be for the director, Alec Coles, to hold onto the funds over various budget cycles. There is no doubt that Coles is a smart political operator and much of the credit for getting this over the line is due to him, but Bill Bleathman, the able director of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, saw the promise of a similar sum whittled away to a paltry $30m for their current redevelopment.

From the largesse of WA’s booming mining driven economy to the other end of the spectrum, and it's interesting to see what happens to museums in an economy that is really being hit hard, namely the UK. The raw facts are that 42% of UK Museums Association member institutions have cut staff in the past year according to their most recent survey, and a quarter have had to close all or part of their sites. Bear in mind that this is what happened in 2011, after at least 2 years prior to that of a similar picture. But the good news is that out of adversity in true British fashion there are good things evolving (and it's not just the lift to the spirits that the Olympics is bringing).  The survey is peppered with comments such as " Challenge does foster resourcefulness", 'There is a more pragmatic approach to service delivery", ' the sector will emerge more radical and responsive to the social needs of the public', and 'being more entrepreneurial has to be good for museums and galleries in the long term'.  Add to this increasing visitor numbers, and 36% of members saying the quality of their services will increase over the coming year ( up from 13% the previous) and it all sounds positively rosy. To top it all, UK public support for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece is on the decline, because there is real concern that Greece's dire financial state would mean they will be unable to properly care for them. Not sure that view is going to hold water in the long term, but for now it will keep the British Museum’s 6 million annual visitors (and rising) happy. 

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices

Environmental Guidelines for museums - an update

I helped convene a seminar at the Australian Museum ten days ago entitled “ Sustainable Buildings for Sustainable Collections – we talk the talk, but can we walk the walk? The impetus for the event came from Morten Rhyl –Svendsen being in Sydney. Morten is from the Danish National Museum, an organisation which has led the way over the last decade in researching and more importantly publishing findings on the optimum method to store museum collections when combining the needs of the objects with energy saving opportunities. Tim Padfield established the Research Centre in the 1970s and Morten is part of the next generation of researchers who are taking the lead in this important area, so it was great to hear where that research is heading.

This is now about not just relaxed temperature and relative humidity parameters, but also about the number of air exchanges, the amount of recycled as against fresh air and isoperms - the rate of decay of objects as determined by the temperature and RH in which they are stored, e.g an object that will last 100 years at an average storage temperature of 22C will last 1000 years at a  temp of 15C. Check out a rather complicated explanation of isoperms here.  

Morten’s keynote was followed by a series of short talks on the science of sustainable environments for museums and the interaction that is required between conservators (determining what climate variance objects can cope with), building managers (advising what climate controls the museum's HVAC system can deliver), and visitor services staff (stating what climate variances visitors will put up with).  

What became clear to me is that the conservator/building manager relationship, where it works well, can deliver some real wins in this area. But the big decisions on the carbon footprint of the institution have to be made at executive level, and the good news is that whilst the debate to date may only have had passing resonance with this level, now that energy cost increases are really beginning to bite, they are sitting up and being prepared to listen. The work that the State Library of Victoria has been undertaking quietly but progressively in very substantially reducing the reliance on HVAC systems to maintain an appropriate environment for the Library's book storage areas has finally gained the attention of the Library's Governing Council.

However the question that I continue to be asked is when are the new relaxed parameters for temperature and RH going to be released. It's a fair call as the AICCM Task force for Guidelines for Museums and Galleries, which I chair, is long overdue in delivering these. As I pointed out in a previous blog this is partly due to the position the National Gallery in the UK is taking by if anything hardening their position. But the reality as I always now spell out is that we have now moved beyond dictating prescriptive blanket conditions and into an era of making evidence-based decisions on what is right for a collection or museum. This means that we have got to understand the particular vulnerabilities and risks of our collections  and the environmental performance capabilities of our buildings and HVAC plant.

That's a daunting task if you are a small regional museum or gallery, but the good news is that there is an increasing amount of literature available to guide you through the process, and the outcome will mean you have a much more in-depth knowledge of the physical state of your collections and the capabilities of your buildings.

Julian Bickersteth

Managing Director

internationalconservationservices